--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Queer-e Vol. 1. no. 1
14.
Part Five : Book Reviews
RECENT BOOKS RECEIVED
If you are interested in reviewing any of the following books received from
publishers for a future issue of Queer-e, please contact Lynda Goldstein or
Kira Hall, the Book Review Team, c/o queer-e-approval@vector.casti.com.
As well, if you would like to get an updated list of the books we have in
our office to be reviewed, please drop us an inqueery post.
John J. McNeill, _Freedom, Glorious Freedom: The Spiritual Journey to
the Fullness of Life for Gays, Lesbians, and Everybody Else_, Boston: Beacon
Press, 1995.
Michael Messner, _Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of
Masculinity_, Beacon Press, 1995.
Robert A. Rhoads, _Coming Out in College: The Struggle for a Queer
Identity_, Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995.
Jonathan G. Silin, _Sex, Death, and the Education of Children: Our
Passion for Ignorance in the Age of AIDS_, New York: Teachers College Press,
1995. Orders: 1-800-575-6566.
**Silin is scheduled to read at A Different Light bookstores in
New York 3/23/95 and San Francisco 4/23/95.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
14. WHAT BECOMES A CLOSET MOST?
by Lynda Goldstein
_______________________________________________
Copyright (c) 1995 by Author, all rights reserved. This text may be
freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any
medium without express written consent from the authors and advance
notification of the editors of Queer-e .
-------------------------------------------------
_Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing_ by Larry Gross.
Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993. 345pp.
_Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power_ by Michelangelo
Signorile. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. 408pp.
In the nearly five years since the publication of Signorile's first
_Outweek_ columns refusing to veil the sexuality of gay and lesbian
celebrities and politicos, the controversies over "outing" have abated in
volume if not in urgency. Although outing can be used as a vindicative and
punishing assault on individuals, when deployed by queer activists its moral
and political purpose is the dismantling of the heterosexism and homophobiaa
that at best diminishes, at worst decimates, our lives. Indeed, for those of us
engaged in direct actions--zappings, kiss-ins, and covert postering--against
the obstructive, powerful queers who compromise the civil liberties of the
rest of us, outing (of one's self or others) remains the most persuasive
approach to destigmatizing queer sexuality. This is the clearest message of
both _Contested Closets_ and _Queer in America_, I want to stress how very
well they complement one another in conveying it. Each, in its very different
way, charts the history, politics, and ethics of outing as a media strategy
for sexual liberation at a moment when increasing numbers of queers are
refusing the safe prison of the closet. While there are necessarily some
overlaps, Gross's text is more comprehensively historical, Signorile's one
queer story in the outing saga.
_Contested Closets_ combines an incisive and passionate history of outing
as an activist strategy with a convenient (but by no means exhaustive)
anthology of numerous original articles from the mainstream and gay/alternative
press so often difficult to find without access to internet, large research
institutions, or generous interlibrary loan policies. These are an essential
component of the text, for one of the things Gross, professor of Communications
at the Annenberg School, Univ. of Pennsylvania, does particularly well is
provide a comprehensive examination of the ways in which journalism functions
to inform and frame public knowledge about the intersections of private,
political, and sexual lives. While the raging debate about outing was most
frequently framed as a "gay issue," Gross reminds us of the importance of
considering the ways in which outing as a celebratory act or an activist
strategy, rather than a punitive threat, problematized journalism's and mass
news media's claims to objectivity and truth with far-reaching consequences
for other cultural discussions (such as the funding of the NEA or publication
of rape victims' names).
But outing has also problematized the very notion of a community of
queers, of how queer identity is constructed and maintained, and of the
"dangers of building a political strategy on the narrow platform of the right
to privacy." This is hardly a new debate among gays and lesbians, of course.
By providing a brief but useful international history of the politicization
of queer identity since the nineteenth century, Gross demonstrates the extent
to which the stakes have always been high, made only more so by the AIDS
crisis. Clearly an advocate of outing, Gross believes the media's unspoken
policy of "inning" celebrities and the right to privacy as a premise for
gay and lesbian inclusion are fundamentally wrong-headed. Yet he fairly
acknowledges the complexities of the stakes of outing, especially for members
of doubly margianlized groups, as well as the problematic construction of a
queer community founded on a minoritizing ethnic model.
Where Gross provides an engagingly readable (the footnoes are often
hilarious) academic history of ACT-UP and Queer National activism, of legal
cases, journalistic hijinks, and Right-wing attacks during the culture wars,
Signorile gives us a very personal account of his early complicity with
maintaining the closet, for himself as a teenager and college student and
for others as a celebrity publicist, and his increasing awareness of the
untenability of that closet in the age of ACT-UP politics. When one's friends
are dying, the smug coziness of the closet becomes an easy target for a little
righteous light, and shine it full force Signorile does. A careful journalist,
he traces the history of "outing," coined by Time magazine as a perjorative
for what it viewed as a violent assault on the integrity of the individual
and his/her "right" to privacy. Like Richard Mohr, Signorile (who prefers the
term, "equalizing") considers outing to be the simple act of telling the whole
truth, an act of moral integrity that enables the entire queer community to
live with dignity. Its journalistic intention is to dismantle the double
standard that allows disclosure of a person's heterosexuality as a matter of
course (and implicitly as a badge of honor), while veiling (even actively
lying about) a person's gay, lesbian, or bisexuality.
Applied to media celebrities, the intentions of such full disclosure
are a more strongly constructed queer community and a normalization of queer-
ness as an indentity (ho, hum, sighs the reader in Middle America, Jodie Foster
and lesbian partner vacationed in Cancun). But as applied to political and
economic powerbrokers, the stakes change, as Signorile illustrates in Part II.
Focused on Washington, particularly the outing of Pete Williams during the
Gulf War, this section examines the Pentagon's policy of selective enforcement
of its "homosexuality is incompatible with military service" argument:
retaining gay and lesbian military personnel during police actions but
discharging them when their bodies and services are no longer needed. As long
as queers who chose the military as a career could not disclose their sexuality
with penalty, the daily image of Pete Williams as spokesperson for such an
organization grated. Central to Signorile's actions and book, the story of the
media's handling of Williams' outing is a fascinating read.
The third act of Signorile's dramatic encounter with outing focuses on
the dream factory of Hollywood, whose dependence on selling images has too
often meant maintaining the security of closets with more deadbolts than any
East Village walk-up. Against the backdrop of the Religious Right's sweepingly
broad drive to censor positive images of marginalized groups we are shown the
reactionary crumbling of actors and executives in the film and television
industries. Where earlier sections of _Queer in America_ focus on the big
outing cases--Forbes and Williams--Part III tells both a broader and more
complex story of outing. Not only do we find the story of LA ACT-UP's outing
of Geffen and Griffin here, but the story of Sheila Kuehl, fired from the
"Dobie Gillis" show 30 years before on the basis of her rumored lesbianism,
and Dick Sargent's coming out. As does Gross, Signorile emphasizes that there
has been an historical shift: while film executives in particular argue that
"gay" doesn't sell at the box office, and Cher might have worried that her
daughter's lesbianism would affect her career, queers who have been outed/
come out and allies who visibly work for gay causes (Streisand) seem not to
have suffered career loses. For advocates of outing, this is justification
enough.
The paperback edition features an epilogue that covers the fight against
Measure 9 in Oregon, the rise of Digital Queers, and a brief queer manifesto
in which Signorile counters the "right" to privacy arguments with "there is
no 'right' to the closet." Echoing Eleanor Roosevelt, he argues that no one
keeps us in the closet but ourselves. In mini pep talks, he singularly
addresses allies and activists, the powerful and the religious right so that
"future generations will be out, proud, and queer in America."
So what might this future look like? Recently, a local chapter of Lesbian
Avengers at my university, justifiably annoyed that there is no published list
of members belonging to the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Support Network (so
that finding a member means scouring the halls for a sticker on a door or
button on a lapel indicating the owner is supportive) threatened to publish
the list of members if the Equity Committee didn't do so by April 1. In a
(surely misguided) attempt to offset possible anxieties of some applying for
membership, we'd all signed a confidentiality clause, which effectively acts
as a contract for the year. Let me be clear here that members are not
necessarily themselves lesbigay; the stipulation is that they be supportive of
folks who are.
When the issue of invisibility was first raised by students, the
Committee (most of whom are Network members) were generally in support of the
publication of names and departments/units. Rather than act to do so
immediately, however, a few months' discussion was declared necessary, in the
main because we're a bureaucratic Unviversity committee hung by the neck with
procedures, though the official reasons were to grant all Networkers time to
reconsider their membership if they would prefer not to have their names on a
centralized list for whatever reason, and to delay expenditure of the
substantial printing costs of a new informational pamphlet listing the names
of members.
In any case, rhetorically riddled with activist impatience at such foot-
dragging, the flyers sent to Networkers compelling the Equity Committee to
publish or be published spurred the Committee to quicker action (a vote after
much discussion to publish a list of willing Networkers on cheap flyers to be
posted in queer-friendly places) but netted as well truly extraordinary
expressions of anger and hurt on the part of those who'd tirelessly worked a
year to set up the Network--the most visibly successful program of the Equity
Committee. Indeed, some of these folks characterized the explicit threat of
the flyer as a guerilla attack, as a divisive tactic, as yet another example
of the queer community eating its own. And they were especially incensed that
the Lesbian Avengers themselves remained anonymous.
One might be tempted to think that this sort of threatened outing is not
quite what Signorile had in mind when he first started outing celebrities and
politicos in power. I mean, we're just a bunch of faculty, staff, and under/
grad students--some of us queer, some queer allies--with too little power to
sway a fundamentally homophobic educational institution, precisely the sort
that Signorile argues ought not to be outed. But to the local Lesbian Avengers,
we ARE in power and, in this case, precisely the problem given our typically
slow deliberations, colonizing notions of queer community, and implicit
right to privacy politics. Moreover, relative to THEM we do have power, and
this is where Signorile's proviso that outing was never meant for "private"
individuals such as teachers becomes downright murky. For banded together as a
university body with a budget, staff support from the office of the Vice
Provost for Educ Equity, and some pretty persuasively loud-mouthed members,
the Equity Committee has been able to wield considerable power. And when our
policies work against our mission to insure, among other things, equity
through visibility, then we are blockading the rights of campus queers,
especially of undergraduates, to learn in a university environment that is
supportive of them. Individuals who participate in such a Committee whitewash,
ought, then, to be outed. Not necessarily as queer--the Lesbian Avengers know
full well this isn't a requirement for membership--but certainly as Networkers.
Calls for apology from the "thoughtless" Lesbian Avengers have been
issued and, quite frankly, I hope they never materialize. The Network and its
membership are INTENDED to be visible, to be out, to be found. Anything less
is an absolute mockery. The Lesbian Avengers know this. And when a University
Committee does not, it is what becomes a closet most.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------